While almost every Formula One season begins with an idea about which teams are likely to win the championship, the 2015 title race was already a foregone conclusion by the end of last year. It seemed that only in the details could an unexpected narrative unfold.

Fortunately, the details proved to be so intricate and surprising that despite it being another year of Mercedes dominance, the soap opera that inevitably takes place up and down the grid was entertaining from beginning to end.

From the outset, the biggest uncertainty concerned how teams would fare with technical regulations that limited the engine manufacturers’ ability to develop their engines once the season began.

The first surprise of the year came at Ferrari, which after last season had purged its top directors. But the new season showed that the Italian team and its new driver, the four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel, had made serious progress on both the car and the engine over the winter. Far from looking as if it would continue its plunge into irrelevance, Formula One’s most legendary team looked to be rising from the previous season’s ashes.

In his Mercedes, Lewis Hamilton scored pole position and victory in the first race, in Australia in March. He again scored the pole in the second race, two weeks later in Malaysia. But it was Vettel in his Ferrari who emerged to control the race and beat the Mercedes through a truly superior performance for the first time since the hybrid engines were introduced last year.

It looked as if Ferrari was back, and it seemed that the logical scenario of the season would see the Italian team and its new recruit offer a serious challenge to Mercedes.

“I gave it everything I could — we did, as a team,” said Hamilton, who finished second in Malaysia. “We knew coming into this weekend that they had made a step; we didn’t know how big, but they were too fast for us today.”

Only the new Ferrari team director, Maurizio Arrivabene, who might have been celebrating more than anyone, was saying the victory happened “too soon.” For him, the car and engine were not yet up to the Mercedes standard.

In fact, it would take until the middle of the season, the Hungarian Grand Prix, on July 26, for Vettel to win another race. But it happened on one of the slowest tracks in the series, with the German able to leapfrog the Mercedes cars at the start and then block and hold them off for the rest of the race.

That race also was marked by emotion after the death the previous week of the French driver Jules Bianchi from head injuries suffered in a crash at the Japanese Grand Prix nine months earlier. It was the first death in Formula One since that of Ayrton Senna in 1994.

“I dedicate this win to Jules and his family,” Vettel said. “The race was difficult especially at the end with all the thoughts coming through my mind.”

A third victory for Vettel would come four races later, at the Singapore Grand Prix, again at a circuit where it is difficult to overtake and this time after a disastrous race for Mercedes. Along with the Hungarian Grand Prix, Singapore was the only race of the year at which a Mercedes driver was not on the podium.

During the rest of the season, the Mercedes drivers were dominant. Hamilton reigned over his teammate, Nico Rosberg, who seemed not to have recovered from losing the title to Hamilton in the final race of the 2014 season, in Abu Dhabi.

By Singapore, the score was seven victories for Hamilton and three for Rosberg. Hamilton had won most of his races thanks to his mastery of the qualifying sessions, from which he emerged with 11 pole positions in those 13 races, with Rosberg taking pole only at the Spanish Grand Prix on May 10 — which he won.

But after Singapore, Rosberg sorted out his qualifying problems and scored the final six pole positions of the season. Hamilton still won three races in a row, securing his second consecutive drivers’ title — and third over all — at the United States Grand Prix on Oct. 25.

After that, Hamilton seemed to go into celebration mode — including a small car accident in the streets of Monaco in the early morning hours the week before the Brazilian Grand Prix — and Rosberg won the last three races of the season.

“It is nice to end a season on a high,” Rosberg said.

Meanwhile, the repercussions of a second year in a row with just two teams winning races but only one capable of winning the title were felt throughout the paddock. The survival of as many as seven of the 10 teams appeared to be at stake because of the lopsided competition. Teams like Red Bull, Toro Rosso, Lotus, Manor, Sauber, Force India and McLaren Honda all found themselves losing sponsors or facing ownership, management or other turmoil.

McLaren, which suffered its worst season since 1967, finishing ninth in the 10-team series, has now lost some of its decades-long sponsors: The TAG-Heuer watch company will move to Red Bull next year after several decades with McLaren, which had already lost its longtime partner Hugo Boss to Mercedes this year. The next to go were said to be Johnnie Walker whisky and the Spanish bank Santander.

Only the Williams team appeared to be thriving in the new era after more than a decade of struggle, even though it failed to live up to expectations that it would challenge Mercedes this year. Its success is due at least in part to a revitalization of the management: Claire Williams, daughter of the team’s founder, Frank Williams, became deputy to her father, and Pat Symonds, who had led both the Benetton and Renault teams during their title-winning years, became the new technical head.

“I don’t know what the secret is,” Claire Williams said. “I think we just tend to keep our heads down and get on doing what we love doing and that’s going racing. We’ve worked hard over the past two years in order to turn this team around. We’ve made a lot of changes within the team and, fortunately, a lot of those changes are paying off.”

But Williams, as a customer of the Mercedes engine, still does not look likely to become a contender for the title as long as Mercedes is competing with its engine, too, and can, at least technically, relegate its customers to the role of second-class citizens.

Finally, the year will perhaps be remembered as a season in which the team managers for once came together to agree that something had to be done to change the direction of the series. They worked hard to create a new set of technical regulations for the 2017 season.

The regulations are designed to create closer racing and faster, louder cars that are more difficult to drive. But that could mean that there will be at least one more season of Mercedes domination next year — unless Ferrari produces as much development this winter as it did last winter. And the continuing soap opera between the Mercedes teammates, Hamilton and Rosberg, promises to make the Grand Prix races into another series of psychological thrillers.

The biggest question for next year might be, What can Ferrari do?

“We would like to stay in front of them, this is an objective,” Ferrari’s Arrivabene said of Mercedes. “But it doesn’t mean we are going to achieve it. But we will try very hard.”